How's a man supposed to know a woman is uninterested in his advances? asks ANN WIDDECOMBE

Ann Widdecombe

The former Tory Minister writes exclusively for the Daily Express

How's a man supposed to know a woman is uninterested in his advances? asks ANN WIDDECOMBE

William Freeman is a man of 58 who has never even had a parking ticket but on an impulse he kissed a friend in the summer of 2016. She drew away and he immediately apologised. What he did was wrong and silly but it is not as if he kissed her lips or tried to fumble with her clothes or otherwise groped her.

Unfortunately for him the lady was one of those wimps who needed counselling and worried about coming across him when she went out. So our hard-pressed police force who can’t cope with burglaries, gangs or the drugs menace were called into action and now, more than 18 months later, the case has come to trial.

The judge gave the silly chap a conditional discharge saying “you do not make advances towards women who do not want you to”.

Yes, Your Honour, but unless you have made an advance how do you know whether the lady wants you to? It is possible to misread a situation.

Most of us have endured unwanted advances in our time and brushed them off. As long as the man does not persist and as long as the contact is not intimate no harm is done. He is the one who is left embarrassed. Yet the prosecuting counsel in this case said the incident had caused the woman a “great deal of hardship”. Rot, she caused herself that by dwelling on instead of dismissing a fleeting nuisance.

She should have swatted him off like a fly and gone back to business as usual.

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Boomerang kids are no kind of hardship

A study by the London School of Economics finds the effect of boomerang children on parents is akin to suffering an illness because it curtails the parents’ freedom which they have been enjoying since the kids flew the nest.

What a sad comment on modern life. We have moved in the course of 50 or 60 years from generations living happily together to small units which are fine as long as they keep their distance.

It is difficult to see why parents should find their children’s presence restricting unless they have reverted to treating their grownup offspring as juveniles. Adult children do not need looking after, and can house-sit while their parents swan off on holiday.

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I left home in my 20s but briefly boomeranged in my 30s. I kept losing flat purchases because my own sale three times fell through at the last minute, so I decided to sell anyway and roost at home while I bought.

My parents enjoyed it so much that they were sad when I left again. They said it reminded them of how empty the house seemed when my brother and I had returned to our boarding schools.

My grandmother was bombed out in the war and came to live with my parents, so I grew up with a granny always at home. In due course my own mother came to live with me after the death of my father. Some of my friends carried on living at home until they married.

My mother grew up in a home which had not only a grandmother but a bachelor uncle and many a household of the time contained a maiden aunt.

We have gone from the extended family to the nuclear family to households of one. Nobody likes living alone more than I do but God forbid that I should ever consider any member of my family the equivalent of a disability.

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Protesting NHS cuts despite the organisation throwing away tons of equipment every day

The madness of the NHS

I have recently discovered that the NHS throws away everything rather than sterilising used equipment.

Every day tons of gloves, aprons, syringes, needles, thermometers, bedpans, etc, are binned.

It is supposed to be cheaper than sterilising. Heaven help the planet.

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Donald Trump was wrong to lift trophy ban

The Trump administration has lifted a US ban on elephant trophies so we can expect more of the poor beasts to be killed for their ivory or feet. It is hardly a step forward for civilisation.

Men who hunt big game for sport are no better than savages with spears. Indeed they are worse, far worse, because savages hunted for food or self defence, not merely to inflict suffering on some of the most beautiful of God’s creation to gratify nothing but their own vanity.

Bad move, Mr President.

YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty

Men who kill one of God's most majestic creatures are worse than savages

Tragic student embarrassed by social media

It seems that not a day goes past without some fresh cruelty on social media being revealed. In the latest case a student hanged himself after details of a fling he had confided to friends on a private site were disseminated by them as a joke to the wider public.

The pattern is familiar: young man boasts of conquest, friends snigger and then gossip.

Once, however, that meant he boasted to friends in a pub who told other mates the next day.

Now it means that all the world can know thoughts we have revealed to only a few, can put our indiscretions on record for ever, can prejudice future employers, upset families and lose friends.

To be young is to be impetuous but to be young is also to lack the sense of proportion which comes from experience, which is why the suicide rate can be high in that age group.

The best advice to give a youngster about social media is only ever to put on it what you would not mind your granny reading.

This is true sound of racist abuse

Amid all the nonsense about golliwogs, micro-aggressions and statues of long dead men, we occasionally get a glimpse of real, shocking racism.

Horrifyingly a black student at Nottingham Trent University was assailed by two men shouting racist chants outside her room, including "we hate blacks". The only black student on that floor, her feelings could not have been much different from those of a Jew on Kristallnacht.

The men are students who have been suspended by the university.

Presumably that means they should be intelligent enough to know better.

If convicted, they should be sent down for good. Higher education is supposed to produce not merely academic qualifications but decent, thoughtful, well-rounded human beings.

The race laws were designed for exactly this sort of offence, not for persecuting people who wear sombreros, braid their hair or serve Jamaican stew.